Looking for an online way to add info to online videos for your students? Check out Popcorn Maker. Seems very simple to use and a great way to add your spin to online videos. So instead of just sending your students to an online video, you can add your own comments and audio to the video to create your own video materials.

If you have any application ideas for Popcorn Maker please share here!

In the movie Rounders, Matt Damon, playing Mike McDermott, says the line, “Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you ARE the sucker.”

It is a great rule of thumb for poker, but also for most things in life. I take a similar approach to businesses, I try to figure out how they are making money or why they are offering a deal. In some cases it makes sense, like when a car dealer has to lower prices on the 2012 models, because they need to make space for the 2013 models that need to be showcased. I understand their reasoning for lowering the price and trying to move more 2012 cars. Or when the waiter is really pushing the steak, I know that the restaurant might have ordered to much steak and needs to sell more of it that night. This works out great for everyone if you are in the mood for steak.

Where I get nervous is when I am offered a deal and can’t figure out how the company is going to make money off it. Or when there is a company, usually online, that is offering a ton of features for no cost to me. (Think Google Docs) Going back to the Matt Damon quote, if I can’t figure out how they are making money, they are probably doing it somehow that I may not like.

This is good thinking for the classroom, because we are all now trying to find ways to use social media in the classroom, but we need to be careful that social media isn’t using our classroom unwillingly to make a profit. Twitter for example is a fantastic tool and comes at no cost to the average user. But it is important to know that it makes money from promoted Tweets.

On the surface that doesn’t seem to be a big deal, but it becomes an issue when you can’t tell the promoted Tweets from the real ones. If your students don’t know that there are paid for ads and promoted Tweets on Twitter, they are susceptible to ads and commercial influences without their knowledge.

We all understand a paid endorsement during a commercial and understand that Michael Jordan may not personally love Nike shoes, but lends his name to the brand. But social media has a different context, and Twitter leads you believe that you are actually hearing from the celebrity or athlete themselves, so an endorsement of a product has a lot more value. It is much more like a recommendation from a friend, than from an ad. Allowing companies to blur that line without our students knowing the truth is a bad path to go down.

Here is a fantastic site that will show you how most of the major social media players make their money. I think it is something that you should share with all your students before bringing social media into your classroom.

This past August the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections put on display what is thought to be only the second known photographic image of Emily Dickinson. For those English teachers out there, showing this image while teaching the works of Dickinson is a no-brainer. But there are other ways that I believe we can use this in the classroom.

Staying in the English classroom, you could use this as a great story starter and have students write a story about what Emily and her friend, Kate Scott Turner, did leading up to this picture, or after the picture was taken. The official release from Amherst says that this photo was taken during a visit Kate had to Amherst. As it stats in the article, it appears that Dickinson is wearing clothes a bit older than standard during the era. This could lead to some interesting research papers as to why Dickinson would wear clothes not current to the style of the day and if there is evidence in her poetry to support this choice of clothing.

Being a former history teacher, I see nothing by research possibilities. Any one of these questions could be used:

Given the history of photographs, why are there only two images of Emily Dickinson?

If a third photograph of Dickinson was to surface, where do you think it would be most likely to surface and why?

You can add this question for any historical figure of which there aren’t a lot of images, like Billy the Kid

Do you believe that any of Emily’s poems were written about Kate Scott Turner? (Might be more for English than History)

How much do you think it cost Emily and Kate to have this picture taken? What would that cost today with inflation?

Going off nothing more than this picture, who do you think most likely took it? (No need for exact names, but just a general type of person. Was it a professional or laborer? Were they literate? What type of house did they live in?)

Just a few of my ideas. How do you think you could use it in your classroom?

For more information on this picture, check out this post on Open Culture.

Poets House is a national poetry library and literary center in New York City. They have been putting up video to the YouTube Channel of actors and authors reading their favorite poetry. For any English teacher I think this is a must follow. Below is one of the recent videos with one of my favorite comedic actors, Bill Murray reading two poems by Wallace Stevens.

For those of you teaching upper High School and College, I found this great article over at edudemic, listing the top Twitter hashtags that every recent grad should know.

If you have students in your class one or two years away from the real world, now would be a great time to review these Hashtags with them. You could even pick one every week or two, and spend 5-10 minutes in class showing the results of that Hashtag. Get those students in the habit of checking their Twitter feed for more than just friend’s and celebrity tweets, but also using it to better themselves professionally.

There are lots of services out there that make creating a hashtag feed easy and simple to keep up with. Personally, I like TweetDeck because it has a plug-in app with Google Crome.

As we all head back to school, I wanted to share this great video with you. As you begin to make lesson plans for these next coming weeks of school, watch this and remember the voice of your Active or Digital Learners.

Fantastic article from the NY Times talking about how current digital students are urging their teachers to use digital tools in the classroom. It shows that by having students shut everything down while in school, we are not helping to replicate the world that they will be working in.

The last quote, by a 17 year old student, sums it all up, “Textbooks become obsolete the minute they’re out”.